East Asian Context Research Articles

Lost in translation: implementing personal assistance in an East Asian context

Since 2012, Taiwanese citizens with disabilities have been entitled to personal assistance from local authorities. To explore current features of personal assistance and barriers to its implementation, and distinguish it from homecare services, 33 disabled people and 12 staff members representing 10 local authorities in Taiwan were interviewed. Findings indicate that disabled people prefer personal assistance to homecare and perceive that relationships with their families have improved since the availability of personal assistance. However, many users’ needs are unmet due to insufficient hours of service and costly co-payments. Results also show that development of personal assistance has been hindered not only by limited resource allocations but also by a lack of awareness of the concepts of independent living and personal assistance among staff. In the context of East Asian culture, independent living is misinterpreted as self-reliance, leading to the resurrection of the medical model of disability. Points of interest In Taiwan, personal assistance was launched by a pilot program (2008-2010) run by a disabled people’s organization. Since 2012, Taiwanese disabled people have been entitled to receive personal assistance from their local authority, but personal assistance has not been widely recognised by local authorities as an option to support disabled people’s independent living. As in Western societies, Taiwanese disabled people prefer personal assistance to homecare. Personal assistance has also promoted positive relationships within families. Limited resources and local authorities’ lack of understanding the meaning of independent living and personal assistance are the main barriers to the provision of adequate support. In the East Asian context, independent living has been misunderstood as self-reliance, suggesting no need for assistance or support, which has led to the domination of the medical model and of professionals’ and carers’ perspectives in the implementation of personal assistance.

Housing transitions of Taiwanese young adults: intersections of the parental home and housing pathways

In the global context, studies have found that young adults are facing increasing difficulties in accessing homeownership and delaying home-leaving. While the Western literature on housing circumstances among younger generations indicates the importance of family support, in an East Asian context, the family is particularly intertwined with housing arrangements given the cultural heritage of filial piety. To elucidate the dynamics of housing transitions, this paper adopted a holistic approach and used sequence analysis to establish distinct housing pathways in a less studied social context, Taiwan. Drawing on data from the Panel Study of Family Dynamics, apart from providing empirical evidence on the emergence of the private rented path and a decline in homeownership associated with housing inequality, this paper explored the diverse housing pathways associated with the principal platform of family support, i.e. the parental home, and found that it may function as both a familisation instrument for young adults seeking independence and negotiating leverage sustaining the filial reciprocity.

A techno-feminist analysis of beauty app development in China’s high-tech industry

ABSTRACT Drawing on a techno-feminist approach, this article foregrounds the socio-technological process of beauty app development in China’s high-tech industry. I conducted semi-structured interviews with ten professionals, six women and four men, who previously worked at a leading Chinese high-tech company and participated in the development of a pioneer, popular beauty app – BeautyCam (Meiyan Xiangji). The research findings reveal that Chinese high-tech professionals often perceive the development of beauty apps as providing female users with a sense of empowerment and facilitating the inclusion of female professionals in the high-tech industry. Despite this feminist veneer, beauty app development poses no challenge to the status quo in Chinese society. Instead, it supports an underlying gendered logic not only by reinforcing existing standards of beauty but also in creating a niche job market that restricts female professionals’ career development. The discussion sheds light on the intersection of gender and technology in an East Asian context where neoliberal pseudo-feminism is evidently on the rise.

‘Transnational film, transnational memory? Collective remembrance in recent pan-asian war films’

ABSTRACT This paper explores the conflict over memory in East Asia by analyzing three pan-Asian film productions that attempt to produce a shared transnational memory of World War II: Purple Sunset (China, 2001), Distant Bonds (Japan, 2009), and My Way (South Korea, 2011). Using Hjort’s taxonomy of transnational cinemas (2009), it argues that all three productions appeal to pan-Asian transnational memory through affinitive transnationalism (transnational memory based on shared cultural heritage), but their overall transnational strategies diverge into cosmopolitan, modernizing, and globalizing transnationalism. Each strategy works to varying success for domestic and international audiences, suggesting that the cultural production of transnational memory remains elusive in the East Asian context. This paper ends with the question of whether cohesive transnational war memory is possible in East Asian cinema, and more broadly, how a stronger trend of pan-Asian transnational filmmaking might emerge outside of contested topics like World War II.

Navigating Sexual Racism in the Sexual Field: Compensation for and Disavowal of Marginality by Racial Minority Grindr Users in Singapore

Abstract This study investigates racialized sexual desires of Grindr users in Singapore, a multiracial East Asian society. We found that users are continually pigeonholed into racial categories tethered to stereotypes, hierarchizing users such that the Chinese majority are considered more desirable. Users employ race labels to communicate racial membership, circumnavigating Grindr’s preset ethnic categories. Users also creatively appropriate interface affordances to enforce racialized preferences; this includes a preoccupation with verifying racial identities, especially through photos. Racial minorities strategically respond to sexual racism by negotiating for Chinese majority membership, emphasizing the cosmopolitan self over the ethnic self, and/or reframing the situation to disavow victimhood. This research counterbalances the ethnocentric focus of existing sexual racism literature on white-centric contexts by applying sexual fields theory to multiracial East Asia, yielding meaningful theoretical contributions. We also foreground the importance of considering internal dispositions of feelings and attitudes as situated resistance against sexual racism on Grindr.Lay summaryThis article explores how sexual desires of Singaporean users on Grindr (a gay dating app) are socially conditioned to include racial preferences, which in turn constitutes sexual racism. This research is important as it examines the complexities of sexual racism within a multiracial and postcolonial East Asian context, balancing the existing scholarly focus on sexual racism in Western societies. Our interviews with Grindr users in Singapore revealed that users tend to slot themselves (and others) into racial categories that appear fixed and linked to racial stereotypes. This allows a pecking order to emerge, such that the racial majority (Singaporean Chinese users) are generally seen as most desirable. Race is therefore one important dimension of the interactions on Grindr. If racial identity is not immediately obvious on app profiles, users often seek to find out the racial identities of other potential partners by, for example, requesting photos to make guesses about their race. We also studied the responses of racial minorities to sexual racism. These strategies include trying to present a Chinese or Chinese-mixed racial identity, emphasizing an identity that is globalized rather than ethnic, and reframing their situation to disavow their victimhood.

The Antecedents of Calling: A Career Construction Perspective

"Research Aims: This study aims to examine the moderating role of leader autonomy support (LAS) in the indirect relationship between cognitive flexibility and calling through job crafting. Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected through an online survey from employees who have been working at a private company for a minimum of one year. Using a convenience sampling method, data were collected from a total of 140 respondents. Data were analysed in SPSS using a moderated mediation model. Research Findings: The results showed that LAS moderated the indirect effect of cognitive flexibility on calling through job crafting. Theoretical Contribution/Originality: This study illustrates the complex relationship between cognitive flexibility, job crafting, and LAS as the antecedents of calling by drawing on career construction theory (CCT), while simultaneously emphasising the importance of situational factors (i.e., LAS) in finding a calling, especially for employees. Managerial Implication in the South East Asian context: Companies are expected to put more effort into understanding the role of individual and situational factors in their employees' journey toward finding a calling. Specifically, leaders' support for employees' job crafting should be strengthened to facilitate employees in discerning their work as a calling. Research limitations & implications: This study has limitations regarding the data collection, as it only uses a cross-sectional design. Additionally, this study only examines the antecedents of calling through employees' perception."

Developing Innovation Ecosystem between Cross-Sector Industry Players through Human Resource Quality Improvement

"Research Aims: This study aimed to analyze the effect of workforce agility on innovative behavior, the effect of digital literacy and psychological conditions on workforce agility, and the role of digital literacy and psychological conditions as moderator variabels on the relationship between workforce agility and innovative behavior. Design/methodology/approach: The type of data collected was primary data using an online questionnaire. The sampling method was purposive sampling technique. The collected data were then processed and analyzed using SEM-PLS. Research Findings: The results of this study indicated that workforce agility had a positive effect on innovative behavior. Digital literacy and psychological conditions also had positive effect on workforce agility. However, only psychological conditions had a moderating effect on the relationship between workforce agility and innovative behavior. Theoretical Contribution/Originality: The results of this study illustrates how workforce agility affects innovative behavior. The use of digital technology through good digital literacy will further encourage the creation of industrial innovations. Managerial Implication in the South East Asian context: Organisations should build massive collaboration among various industry players in all sectors, by encouraging workforce agility in order to create industrial innovations. Research limitation & implications: This study has uneven number of samples in each industry. Future studies can consider sampling where each industrial sector can have sufficient sample similarity so comparisons can be made."

Job Satisfaction of IT Workers in East Asia

The purpose of this study is to explore the drivers of job satisfaction of IT workers in the East Asian context, particularly in Taiwan, Japan, and China. Using data collected from IT workers, decision tree inductions were employed to identify the predictors of job satisfaction. Results indicate that the level of education has no effect on job satisfaction. Overall, higher uncertainty avoidance results in lower job satisfaction, and more experienced IT workers appear to be more satisfied. In Taiwan, longer serving IT workers, who are likely to hold more senior positions and spend more time on the job, are more satisfied with their jobs. Similarly, in Japan, older IT workers are more satisfied. In China, job satisfaction of IT workers differs across job roles and industries. It is recommended that management practices and policies in Taiwan focus on bridging gaps between longer serving and newer IT workers in terms of their ability to handle ambiguous work situations; whereas in Japan, these should focus on providing work flexibility and stress management programs to allow room for family support. In China, these should be tailored to specific job roles and industries in view of their different experiences with job satisfaction determinants.

First order and second order indirectness in Korean and Chinese

In this study, we investigate two types of indirectness in East Asian context, namely, native Korean and Chinese speakers' understanding of indirectness (i.e. first order indirectness) and their linguistic performance of indirectness (i.e. second order indirectness). In comparison to their western counterparts, East Asian communities have often been labeled as being indirect, while little attention has been paid to the variations in their indirectness. Our study explores this topic by analyzing three different sets of data, including Korean and Chinese speakers' contextual awareness, linguistic performance, and metapragmatic comments. The findings reveal a great deal of within-group variability in both the Korean and Chinese speakers’ choice of directness and indirectness, as well as a considerable number of cross-cultural differences. Korean and Chinese participants demonstrate different assessments of first order indirectness and reversed patterns in their use of second order indirectness. The variation in their communication styles and cross-cultural differences can only be explained by taking into consideration both the visible role relationships in an immediate context and the invisible interpersonal interests defined by each culture. The two aspects mesh together to form an intricate relational web, to which both native Korean and Chinese speakers are highly sensitive.

A recepção internacional da obra de A. J. Greimas: viagens, traduções, transmissões

Este estudo de caso em história das ciências da linguagem insere-se na perspectiva metodológica da história intelectual, na qual analisamos o impacto internacional de A. J. Greimas (1917-1992) e de sua obra, por meio do estudo das práticas de comunicação, de deslocamento e de tradução. As missões científicas realizadas fora da França, o número e a origem dos estudantes estrangeiros matriculados no seu seminário, em Paris, bem como a cronologia e a geografia linguística das traduções de sua obra ajudam a traçar, avaliar e explicar a difusão e o desenvolvimento mundial das suas ideias. Seu projeto inspirou apropriações distintas e, às vezes, estruturas institucionais em vários contextos culturais e linguísticos, incluindo contextos românicos, anglo-americanos, germânicos, eslavos, lituanos e do leste asiático. A conclusão deste ensaio avalia a importância do contato pessoal, do contexto sócio-histórico e do status sociolinguístico e didático do francês para a recepção mundial de Greimas. Ademais, este trabalho é baseado em trabalhos científicos publicados, documentos de arquivo, entrevistas e comunicações pessoais com tradutores e editores, com Greimas e seus colaboradores e com especialistas das diferentes culturas estudadas.

Rice farming care as a novel method of green care farm in East Asian context: an implementation research

BackgroundGreen care farms, which offer care for people with dementia in a farm setting, have been emerging in the Netherlands. The aim of this study was to 1) implement green care farms which use rice farming in Japan, 2) explore the positive experiences of rice farming care, and 3) compare the effect of rice farming care to that of usual care on well-being and cognitive ability.MethodsWe developed a new method of green care farm in Japan which uses rice farming, a farming that is practiced all over East Asia. The participants were 15 people with dementia (mean age = 75.6 ± 9.8 years) who participated in a one-hour rice farming care program once a week for 25 weeks. We also collected qualitative data on the positive experiences of study participants after the program. As a reference data, we also collected the corresponding data of the usual care group which included 14 people with dementia (mean age = 79.9 ± 5.8 years) who were attending the near-by day-care.ResultsThe mean participation rate on the rice farming care group was 72.1%. After the intervention, participants reported experiencing enjoyment and connection during the program. It also changed the staff’s view on dementia. The green care farm group showed a significant improvement in well-being but no significant difference in cognitive function compared to the usual care group.ConclusionsGreen care farms by using rice farming is promising care method which is evidence-based, empowerment-oriented, strengths-based, community-based dementia service, which also delivers meaningful experience for the people with dementia in East Asia.Trial registrationUMIN, UMIN000025020, Registered 1 April 2017.

Guerilla capitalism and the platform economy: Governing Uber in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong

ABSTRACT Platforms play an increasingly important role in organizing our economic and political systems globally. Drawing on the varieties of capitalism (VoC) approach and the notion of regulatory entrepreneurship, this article introduces the concept of guerilla capitalism to describe an emerging politically led and economic operative logic of platforms: their profitability relies on the active exploitation of legal gray zones and their ability to harness their network power to openly contest and reshape legislation politically. Through a comparative study of Uber’s operation in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, this article demonstrates that, despite the fact that Uber’s guerilla growth strategy remained strong, its political playbooks resulted in diverse dynamics within different regulatory regimes. The article further explains why its playbook was relatively more effective in the democratic context because the firm could successfully mobilize the fictitious voice of the citizens to legitimize its business. Through these three case studies, this article contributes to the existing literature on platform studies by introducing novel uses of political economy. It also enriches the VoC and platform economy literature by studying the behaviors of platforms in East Asian contexts which exist under separate and specific political regimes.

The political initiative of Taiwan’s education for sustainable development: Looking through the lens of Chinese legalism

This article examines the development of Taiwan’s Environmental Education Act and how Education for Sustainable Development was mainstreamed into the national policy framework within the country. The goal is to understand the policy tools and governing strategies that were used by the Taiwan government to develop and implement a nationwide environmental education policy for integrating environmental sustainability into all areas and levels of teaching and learning. Official documents related to national plans for ESD and environmental education policies were analyzed and examined. In particular, Chinese Legalism was used as a lens to interpret the government’s philosophy, assumptions, unspoken norms, legislative practices, and deliberate strategies. Several principles and techniques proposed by Chinese Legalists were used to examine the negotiation and formulation of Taiwan’s Environmental Education Act. This analysis contributes to our understanding of the ways in which UNESCO’s framework of ESD can be transferred into a national policy. A discussion of the Chinese Legalist philosophy also offers a cultural frame of reference to think about ESD politics and governance in other East Asian contexts.

Athlete brand image influence on the behavioral intentions of Generation Z

We investigated the effect of athlete brand image (ABI) on Generation Z's behavioral intentions, when controlling for congruency of advertised products. We are the first to apply the relatively new concept of ABI to the intent of behavior in a specific consumer segment in an East Asian context. Data from a survey of 563 Korean respondents were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results show that congruency acted as a mediator in the conceptual model. The findings also suggest that sportsmanship, role model, and relationship effort appeared to be the most important attributes of ABI. Consequently, athletes and their agents should concentrate on specific attributes to develop stronger brand images. By better understanding the impact of ABI on Generation Z, marketers can effectively target this unique consumer base, which will enable the sustainable development of the advertising market.

Tourist–Tourist Social Interaction in the Co-creation and Co-destruction of Tourism Experiences among Chinese Outbound Tourists

ABSTRACT The notion of tourists as co-creators of value (experiences) has been explored in the context of co-creation with service providers and residents. However, co-creation of value among tourists and the role of social interaction remain relatively underexplored. Similarly, the few extant studies on negative value creation (co-destruction) have predominantly focused on tourist–host interaction. This study examines how tourists from China visiting Japan perceive the role of social interaction with other tourists in shaping tourism experiences. Analysis of 29 in-depth interviews shows that indirect interaction with other tourists has a stronger influence on the tourism experience than direct interaction does. Perceived roles of other tourists ranged from positive (co-creation) to negative (co-destruction). The types of co-created value (Reichenberger, 2017) were mainly practical and atmospheric, whereas co-destructed value was mainly atmospheric in nature. This study also extends, confirms and partly modifies Pearce’s (2005a) typology of other tourists in an East-Asian context.

Stricter Teacher, More Motivated Students? Comparing the Associations Between Teacher Behaviors and Motivational Beliefs of Western and East Asian Learners.

Teacher behaviors are one of the most significant factors influencing student learning. Students from different cultures may have different interpretations of their teachers’ behaviors. This study compared the associations between teacher strictness, teacher feedback, and students’ motivational beliefs using data from six Western countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Finland, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand) and six East Asian regions (Japan, Korea, mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015. A total of 89,869 15-year-old students were included in data analysis. The findings indicate that (i) teacher strictness was negatively associated with Western students’ motivation, but positively related to that of East Asian students; (ii) teacher feedback had significant positive associations with the motivational beliefs of both Western and East Asian students; and (iii) there was a positive relationship between teacher strictness and teacher feedback in East Asian context. These results highlight the need to consider cultural factors when interpreting students’ reactions to teacher behaviors.

The global v. the local: Knowledge construction and building Western university with Chinese/local characteristics

Viewing through the center-periphery paradigm and “glonacal” agency heuristic, the current study conceptualized three levels of localization in knowledge construction and explored their connection to different types of universities in Chinese societies. In-depth interviews with 22 Chinese academics revealed their general approval of Western epistemological dominance and conception of localization in knowledge construction as processes occurring at the surface level. Also emerged from the data were their vision of Chinese university as Western university with Chinese/local characteristics and little signs of a Chinese model of university in their minds. The study ends by comparing its findings with previous studies and identifies parallels to support implications drawn for the future development of higher education in Chinese and East Asian contexts.

He Yin Zhen’s Critical Ruism: Feminist Reclamation and Chinese Philosophy

This article is a case study in feminist reclamation in Ruist (Confucian) philosophical traditions. While most feminist reclamation has been concentrated in the history of western philosophy, this article considers what is involved in feminist reclamation in an East Asian context, taking one of Ruism’s greatest critics as its subject. The article argues that early twentieth-century Chinese anarcho-feminist He Yin Zhen 何殷震 (aka He Ban何班, He Zhen 何震, ca.1884–1920) should be considered a Ruist (Confucian) philosopher, providing reasons ranging from the historical to the decolonial. Because of her sensitivity to issues of gender, hierarchy, and oppression, and her critical interventions in Ruist philosophy, it argues that He Yin Zhen’s work enriches the Ruist canon and could transform Ruist philosophizing for the future.

That Dynamic Spectrum

That Dynamic Spectrum Johanna S. Ransmeier Keywords comparative slavery, freedom, manumission, status hierarchy, gender, kinship, historiography, East Asia, China European philosophers, from ancients like Aristotle to Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, no matter how radically different their attitudes toward slaveholding, articulated a mutually constitutive relationship between “freedom” and “slavery.” Each recognizes the character of the other in its negative reflection; resulting, according to Hegel, in a (life-or-death) negotiation between extremes.1 For the slave societies of Ancient Rome or the Atlantic world, a theoretical bifurcation of the population reigned. The line between free and unfree proved politically useful not just to those who sought to preserve the institution of slavery but to later abolitionists as well. It demarcated the lines of struggle and the wrongs of slavery. By highlighting how the proposed dichotomy fails to capture the multiplicity of forms slavery takes around the world—and in the East, Inner, and Southeast Asian contexts described in this special issue—I do not wish to undercut this politics of liberation or to minimize the absolute degradation enacted by slave traders and slaveholders. Close examination of global practices of enslavement, however, tests the proposition that these two concepts need each other. The supposedly tidy binary between free and unfree has become a kind of zombie idea, one that scholars of slavery must always and repeatedly dispatch, before proceeding to describe the evidence of exploitation they find in the archive at hand. And, it is not so much that the two terms are not opposites—for in many ways, they are—but rather that, as we encounter freedom or slavery in the world, the concepts operate in radically diverging ways. [End Page 267] Freedom is an abstraction, at best an aspiration, at worst a slogan—a perhaps unattainable event horizon. As a practice, it can only be imperfect, something to move toward.2 Slavery, on the other hand, is blood, sweat, pain, stolen lives, deaths. It is a system, a set of processes hard at work in the world. It is not abstract. Turning to the archives of Asia, scholars immediately confront flaws in any proposed dichotomy of freedom and slavery. Across this vast terrain, diverse ideas and justifications collide and mingle. Drawing upon “notes of certification” from Qing-era Mongolia, Sam H. Bass describes how lay people from all walks of life sought merit, spiritual freedom, and transcendence through their donation of slaves to Buddhist monasteries, demonstrating that “liberation was a release from slaveholding rather than from slavery.”3 Claude Chevaleyre explains how lineage regulations and admonitions in the Ming and Qing period prescribed the proper treatment of domestic slaves, prevailing upon elites to be modest in their slaveholding and to defer to the lineage with regard to discipline.4 Sun Joo Kim finds enslaved people in Chosŏn Korea acting as legal subjects, with the capacity to mobilize against yangban 兩班, the social elites, through petitions.5 Meanwhile, Japanese troops invading Chosŏn in the Imjin War (1592–1598) took Koreans as war captives. From memoirs from the battlefield and local records from Japan, Nam-lin Hur writes that abducted men and women faced increasingly brutal treatment as that conflict dragged on and were integrated into Japan’s domestic slave market and traded along the archipelago.6 If these Korean captives were fortunate, they might be valued by daimyo owners for their skills. Few were repatriated. Dating to around the same time period, the world that Tina Lu uncovers in the novel Jinpingmei 金瓶梅 (The plum in the golden vase) shows how trafficked women abused and manipulated each other, [End Page 268] exercising circumscribed power within nested layers of domination within the late Ming Chinese household.7 Documentation of these layered systems of enslavement brings us to a new problem. Rather than embrace an oversimplified dichotomy, scholars of Asia must now grapple with the specter of “the status spectrum.” This short-hand representation of genuine hierarchies, while more inclusive than the zombie binary alluded to above, risks minimizing the extent of exploitation that can hide behind a veil of cultural relativism. No matter how bewildering the range of statuses we see represented in the archives of slavery across eastern Asia seem...

The making of the ‘useless and pathological’ uterus in Taiwan, 1960s to 1990s

AbstractDuring the 1960s and 1970s, the notion that the uterus is a useless and pathological organ after a woman has had ‘enough’ children emerged alongside news reports of excessive hysterectomy in Taiwan. This notion and hysterectomy became two sides of the same coin, the former pointing to the burden of birth control and cancer risk, and the latter to sterilization and removing cancer risk. I explore how, in post-war Taiwan, the notion became commonplace through the intersection of three historical formations: the medical tradition of employing surgery to manage risk (such as appendectomy for appendicitis), American-dominated family planning projects that intensified the surgical approach and promoted reproductive rationality, and cancer prevention campaigns that helped cultivate a sense of cancer risk. The gender politics operating in the family planning and cancer prevention projects were apparent. The burden of birth control fell mainly on women, and the cancer prevention campaign, centring almost exclusively on early detection of cervical cancer, made cancer into a woman’s disease. I argue that the discourses of reproductive rationality and disease risk were parallel and, in several key ways, intersecting logics that rendered the uterus useless and pathological and then informed surgeons’ practice of hysterectomy. Exploring the ways in which the uterus was envisioned and targeted in the history of medicine in Taiwan, this paper shows overlapping bio-politics in three strands of research in an East Asian context – namely women’s health, family planning and cancer prevention – and offers a case for global comparison.